December 2023 Summary and 2024 Reading Plans

Dad died just before Christmas, so all my plans were scrapped. We spent a dreadful week sitting with dad before he died, during which I’d tried to read Possession, but I can’t look at it now, plus it really is the most turgid book.

As well as the work reviewed on the blog in December, I finished Joseph Roth’s The Radetsky March and read a newly published retelling of 1984, Julia by Sandra Newman – I was delighted by a totally unexpected scene that was clearly set in our local South London, Victorian-era ‘anthropological’ museum, the Horniman, famous for its over-stuffed walrus.

I have reading plans for January but am not going to put a huge amount of pressure on myself to finish them, and will pick and choose at random I think from my current teetering pile:

One additional book I’m planning to spend some time with is a bird book of my dad’s that I remember copying drawings from as a child (pictured at the top of this post). It’s the AA Reader’s Digest Book of British Birds, published in 1969 – which doesn’t sound particularly inspiring – but it has beautiful painted illustrations, which, for me, are really evocative. Maybe I’ll start a bird-spotting project – dad was a keen ornithologist to the end, even after he became overwhelmed by dementia and was unable to walk, he still asked for his binoculars.

Lebkuchen: An Austrian-influenced Treat

My son and I rounded off the year by baking some Lebkuchen, honey-sweetened gingery festive treats popular in Austria, as well as Germany. We used a recipe from BBC Good Food, and I’m linking to it rather than reproducing it, as I don’t want to provoke the ire of the BBC recipe rights team :). Home-baked Lebkuchen are much nicer than the ready-made imports that I’ve bought from a local deli in the past.

Although we have baked gingerbread in previous years, it is easy to overcook and goes hard quite quickly, so doesn’t seem to keep very well. In contrast, these Lebkuchen are really easy to make, and appear to be impossible to screw up. We didn’t use the recipe’s suggestion of mixing 100g icing sugar with a beaten egg white to decorate, and instead just made our usual white icing, with icing sugar and water (adding a bit of green food colouring to some of it).

I’m not a super-keen and proficient cook, but these were delicious biscuity treats, with just the right level of gingery spice, and feel healthier and tastier than bought biscuits to accompany a cup of tea. Highly recommended!

My Top 10 Tracks by Parov Stelar (Austria)

When it came to selecting a contemporary musician from Austria, Parov Stelar immediately sprang to mind. Dubbed the inventor of electro-swing, it’s possible he’s a bit of a ‘Marmite’ choice, and I have to be in the mood for his brand of eurotrash: it’s usually upbeat and sometimes cheesy, although there are works of pure beauty there. Good for cleaning to or getting ready for a party, perhaps, rather than to accompany a deep dive into the latest international political crisis or the composition of a note of condolence.

My husband hates Parov Stelar with a passion: he describes his music as “pseudo olden-timey (often jazz-inspired) melodies with an offbeat umcha umcha”, noting that “if you’re a girl it’s maybe ok and you can wear a flippy dress and dance about … but if you’re a guy it’s just an excuse to wear a fedora and braces and dance around with a fake surprised face”. And do you know what, there’s more than an element of truth there – I spluttered with laughter.

But many tracks transcend that rather dismissive summary. So, on that note, here are my top 10 songs by Parov Stelar – beautiful tracks, which I play on repeat:

  1. Wake Up Sister (2014)

2. Toxic Lover (2022)

3. Soul Fever Blues, feat. Muddy Waters (2017)

4. The Phantom (2014)

5. The Princess (2012)

6. The Voodoo Engine (2021)

7. Homesick (2015)

8. The Sun, feat. Graham Candy (2014)

9. Candy Girl, feat. Vallemarie (2022)

10. Everything of My Heart (2017)

Overall progress in bucket list aim to Read and Watch the World (by reading/reviewing for each country at least 5 books (a mix of fiction and non-fiction), 5 films/TV, an artist or artists, food and music)

AUSTRIA

Books:

Artists:

Gustav Klimt/Egon Schiele

Film/TV:

The Dreamed Ones (2016)

Music

Parov Stelar

Book Review – The View From Down Here: Life as a Young Disabled Woman by Lucy Webster

Part polemic, part memoir, Lucy Webster writes of negotiating her way through life as a female wheelchair user. Published this year, this is an important book, peppered with enlightening (as well as entertaining) snapshots of Webster’s life.

The book works as a useful primer on concepts like ‘ableism’, which remain a blind spot for many of those who are otherwise knowledgeable and thoughtful. People seem either not to fully understand, or almost not to believe in it:

“At its most basic, ableism is discrimination in favour of non-disabled people and against disabled people. It is the privileging of certain bodies and ways of living that conform to a perceived norm. It is the belief that disabled bodies or minds – and the people who have them – are inherently inferior to others, and that therefore these people should be avoided, abused, coddled and pitied. It is a rigid set of assumptions about the literal and metaphorical spaces to which people do and do not belong, which are then enforced by the power of cultural, social and legal discrimination … Ultimately it leads to (often unspoken) decisions that some lives are less valuable than others, whether that’s in terms of physical access, healthcare, education, financial security or, indeed, friendship and love. If you care about equality, you should care about ableism.”

Examples of ableist infrastructure includes much of the London underground network, which remain inaccessible to disabled people, and some large tourist attractions such as the London Aquarium (which utterly failed my daughter when we visited).

Webster asserts that ableism combined with everyday sexism makes life as a disabled woman especially challenging. When getting a taxi to her job at the BBC, she is asked by a well-meaning male driver, “Are you sure, love?”, as if her job as a journalist is quite literally incredible.

If you think you’re not ableist, you probably are. I’ve spent a huge chunk of my adult life advocating for my daughter, but nevertheless she frequently accuses me as being ableist! (She’s established an anti-ableism club at school with a friend.)

When institutions make an effort to improve accessibility, it makes life as a disabled person infinitely easier to navigate, reducing stress and removing impediments to participation in everyday life. Webster cites her alma mater, Warwick University, which she found to be completely accessible, with tables in the campus pub that her wheelchair fitted under, and a library in which she could reach things with ease, where she flourished and made lifelong friends after a challenging time with sly ‘mean girl’ bullying at her academic girls’ school.

She points out that as a typical young woman she wants to go clubbing and pubbing with her friends, but that even when venues are accessible inside, they sometimes prove impossible for a wheelchair to physically enter.

Webster longs to become a mother, and a long section covers ableist attitudes towards romantic relationships and parenting. She feels that while all disabled people face obstacles to dating, women have, in particular, to content with a culture of desexualisation and infantilisation:

“I think of all the times I have been called “pretty for a disabled girl”, as if this is somehow a compliment.”

There is an assumption that severely physically disabled women can’t and shouldn’t become mothers, which Webster strongly refutes. She recognises that she would need support – and already has an extensive care package in place, as she needs help even to get washed and dressed in the morning. But she sees no reason why she should be denied the opportunity to become a mother simply because she is disabled.

I did wonder if she had underestimated the intensity of child rearing in the early years as one thing she said jarred: “How many Instagram memes praise mums as single-handedly meeting all the emotional, physical and often financial needs of their kids and then turning to a bottle of wine when they go to sleep? Why is this considered a good thing?” She seemed to have missed the point that it’s NOT seen as a good thing! That able-bodied mothers hugely resent “doing it all”, although she has a legitimate complaint that mainstream feminism is often exclusionary towards disabled women.

This is a book that deserves a wide readership, and I hope Webster doesn’t find that she is simply preaching the converted, and that it isn’t only other disabled people and the people close to them that pick up this book.

Film Review: The Dreamed Ones (Austria)

I’m interested in literary biography, and that extends to lives examined through film. I thought this 2016 Austrian movie, directed by Ruth Beckermann, could be interesting, focusing as it does on the correspondence between Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann and the German-language poet Paul Celan.

The film is a low-budget affair, in which two actors (played by Anja Plaschg and Laurence Rupp) meet in a studio to read and record the two writers’ letters to each other. Much of the film takes place in a single room, with occasional forays to a fire escape for a smoke. Mirroring the caring but frequently rivalrous relationship that unfolds in the content of the letters, the young actors seem at times very close, confiding and smoking and listening to music, while at other times a chasm seems to emerge between them. The emotional intensity of the letters is conveyed through lingering shots of the actors’ faces and the female actor’s frequent tears – whether these response are unscripted is unclear. I’ve got a high tolerance for pretentious nonsense, but this film tipped me over the edge.

In its defence, the relationship between the two writers is genuinely fascinating, although the film tried its best to detract from that. Probably better to go direct to the letters themselves.

Celan was a Holocaust survivor whose parents had been killed by the Nazis, while Bachmann’s father had returned home safely from the Second World War after fighting on the German side. Celan had clearly experienced unknowable pain, and as a refugee attempted to recreate a life from scratch, first in Vienna and then in Paris. Perhaps he felt that things came too easily to Bachmann, and he certainly at one stage seems to have accused her of some degree of complicity with the Nazi regime, causing her to break off contact for several years, during which time he married. Over the course of their romantic entanglement during 1948-51 Bachmann and Celan spent little time in physical proximity, but they evidently had enduring feelings for each other and were in touch regularly after meeting by chance again in 1957 until just before Celan’s death by suicide in 1970.

Overall progress in bucket list aim to Read and Watch the World (by reading/reviewing for each country at least 5 books (a mix of fiction and non-fiction), 5 films/TV, an artist or artists, food and music)

AUSTRIA

Books:

Artists:

Gustav Klimt/Egon Schiele

Film/TV:

The Dreamed Ones (2016)

November-December 2023 Wrap-Up and Reading Plans

November didn’t pan out as expected and I didn’t participate in all the lovely November challenges as I’d wished. This was partly as my dad’s very ill, so I’ve been travelling back and forth a bit. And it was partly – in stark contrast – as I had an old schoolfriend (we met in 1985) to stay for three nights (a highlight of which was going to see comedy at the Banana Cabaret), as well as general catching up on other social things, including a Soho bar crawl for my husband’s birthday – pic is of the interior of the very cool Soma.

I did a few other cultural things in November, and read a few books. Favourite film of the month was UK release Saltburn, although it has divided critics. It combines parody and moments of high comedy (Richard E. Grant is brilliant) with the darkest of plots. I probably don’t need to give a synopsis of this film, as, where I live in the UK at least, it is everywhere. Here’s a trailer though – since I’m a sucker for shallow glamour and a surface veneer, it gives me goosebumps.

I didn’t go to Oxbridge for university, but I did move south to London (where I’ve stayed ever since), and I met more than my fair share of glossy posh boys like Felix Catton (played with impeccable English accent and mannerisms by the Australian actor Jacob Elordi, who is also playing Elvis in upcoming movie Priscilla).

We also streamed at home dodgy US horror film Meghan and the much better, enigmatic Netflix release The Killer, and I went to the cinema to see the intriguing French courtroom drama Anatomy of a Fall.

I snuck in reviews late last month of new Nobel laureate Jon Fosse’s A Shining and Stefan Zweig’s Austrian classic The World of Yesterday. I also loved the audio book of Mr Loverman by Bernardine Evaristo, mainly because of the amazing delivery by narrator James Goode. Other reads were The Gospel According to the New World by Maryse Conde (for book club), the recently published memoir alcohol/grief memoir This Ragged Grace by Octavia Bright, An American Marriage by Tayari Jones (I didn’t like this one – it lost me with one bizarre coincidence too many) and a weird Austrian novel of subverted desire and grubby stifled perversions, The Piano Teacher by Nobel winner Elfriede Jelinek.

And here is my reading list for December:

  • Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh – lots of critics have compared Saltburn with Brideshead, so I thought I would read it. Then Goodreads tells me I already read it in 2000 and gave it just two stars! So let’s see what I make of it now, after 23 years and having developed an unhealthily nostalgic streak (impulse book shop purchase while seeking out and taking stealthy pics of my husband’s newly published book Gin: A Tasting Course – which is the perfect Christmas book for the gin lover in your life!)
  • The Radetsky March by Joseph Roth – continuing my deep dive into Austrian lit with this 20th century classic (library)
  • In the Night of Time by Antonia Munoz Molina – Spanish novel nominated this month by the World Book Club on the BBC’s World Service (library)
  • The View from Down Here by Lucy Webster – newly published angry memoir and polemic by a UK writer with cerebral palsy (library)
  • Julia by Sandra Newman – there’s a fashion at the moment for revisionist story-telling/biography from the female perspective, but having loved Newman’s time-twisting novel The Heavens, as well as Orwell’s 1984, I feel I’m guaranteed to like this one (library)
  • Possession by A S Byatt – nominated by my book club at our November get-together, in light of the author’s death (own copy, has been in my TBR piles for years)
  • The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins – seems an appropriately wintery read (newly found in a charity book sale at my daughter’s riding school)
  • Return to Vienna: A Journal by Hilde Spiel – bought second-hand in English translation after Marina Sofia recommended this writer on her blog. As it details the writer’s return to Vienna after WW2 it seemed to follow on naturally from Zweig’s memoir (new online purchase)

Other Book Purchases during November and added to the ever-expanding TBR piles:

Quackery: A Brief History of How to Cure Everything by Lydia Kang (bought during a visit with my daughter to a cool museum near the Shard called the Old Operating Theatre);

Art Monsters by Lauren Elkin and One Photo A Day Keeps the Doctor Away by Joost Joossen, acquired during an after-work trip to Tate Modern to see the Philip Guston show;

The Inseparables by Simone de Beauvoir (impulse buy at the railway station on my way to my mum’s).

The World of Yesterday: Memoirs of a European by Stefan Zweig (Austria – #Germanlitmonth)

Translated from German by Anthea Bell

“This is, in short, a book that should be read by anyone who is even slightly interested in the creative imagination and the intellectual life, the brute force of history upon individual lives, the possibility of culture and, quite simply, what it meant to be alive between 1881 and 1942.” – Nicholas Lezard

Legendary Austrian writer Stefan Zweig was born in 1881 in Vienna, and his life straddled peacetime under the seemingly immutable Habsburg monarchy, and life during the First World War, the interwar period, and much of the Second World War, towards the end of which he and his wife took their own lives.

“In hardly any other European city was the urge towards culture as passionate as in Vienna.”

Zweig was born into a wealthy, cosmopolitan Jewish family, and his reflections on his comfortable, intellectually stimulating childhood are full of a bitter nostalgia. He repeatedly writes of the “lighthearted” and optimistic nature of pre-1914 Vienna. Early in the book he contrasts the steady, predictable course of the lives of his parents and grandparents with the lives of his own generation of Austrian Jews:

“We who have been hunted through the rapids of life, torn from our former roots, always driven to
the end and obliged to begin again … we for whom comfort has become an old legend and security,
a childish dream, have felt tension from pole to pole of our being, the terror of something always
new in every fibre.”

The book provides a historical overview of the life at end of the 19th century and in the first part of the 20th
century in Austria, as well as a detailed cultural history, as Zweig name-drops the actors, composers,
politicians, writers and other significant figures that he met, some of whom remain well known to this day, and others who have dropped off the radar, despite Zweig’s conviction that their work could not fail to endure.

From the vantage point of around 1940, he writes that the Austrian people entered the First World War in 1914 in a state of childish naivety, which by 1939 had been overtaken by cynicism, and which had destroyed trust in their leaders.

“If today, thinking it over calmly, we wonder why Europe went to war in 1914, there is not one sensible reason to be found, nor even any real occasion for the war. There were no ideas involved, it was not really about drawing minor borderlines; I can explain it only, thinking of that excess of power, by seeing it as a tragic consequence of the internal dynamism that had built up during those forty years of peace, and now demanded release”

War for Zweig was the result of an inevitable, cyclical drive towards conflict, akin to Freud’s idea of the death drive – and an unsettling idea amid the current intense global instability and the rise of populist leaders. Perhaps this is the book’s power – while vividly recreating a lost era, it continues to resonate in the present, where it can be easy to assume that the status quo is immune from disruption.

Zweig records how the population was unprepared for Hitler’s later rise, sticking to their daily routines and living in a state of denial, even while “the underground cracks and crevices between the classes and the races, which the age of conciliation had so laboriously patched up” tore open.

Achieving great success from a young age in his literary endeavours, Zweig suffered immeasurably at the hands of the Nazis, and bemoaned the destruction wrought on society by them, although he would have been unaware at the time of his death of the extent of the horror that was to be revealed by the end of the war. At the time of Zweig’s death his work was no longer considered publishable in his home nation, where people who he had counted as friends had turned away from him in the street, and he had ultimately been rendered stateless. Nationalism, he writes in the foreword, is the “ultimate pestilence that has poisoned the flower of our European culture”.

I seem driven to wartime memoirs, having read and been gripped by many: Judith Kerr’s classic
trilogy of her life as a refugee from Nazi Germany; Vera Britton’s classic first world war memoir Testament of Youth; Ariana Neumann’s When Time Stopped; an Sierra Leonean account of life as child soldier, Ishmael Beah’s A Long Way Gone. Perhaps these accounts are so compelling because, as Zweig notes at the end of his book: “in the last resort, every shadow is also the child of light, and only those who have known the light and the dark, have seen war and peace, rise and fall, have truly lived their lives”.

Overall progress in bucket list aim to Read and Watch the World (by reading/reviewing for each country at least 5 books, 5 films/TV, an artist or artists, food and music)

AUSTRIA

Books:

Artists:

Book review: A Shining (Kvitleik) by Jon Fosse (Norway)

Translated by Damion Searls

I’m back after a long absence from the blog which I can put down to many things: my dad being very ill, overwork, endless building work, a barely functional non-work computer, usual family demands, and a dose of general inertia.

In the summer I signed up for a four-book fiction subscription with prize-grabbing publisher Fitzcarraldo and their distinctive oh-so-stylish blue and white covers. After Mild Vertigo by Japanese author Meiko Kanai (it was ok) came A Shining by the Norwegian Jon Fosse, newly published in English and sitting conveniently on my bookshelf at the very moment he won the Nobel Prize in Literature in early October. I’d not read any of his work. Didn’t know he was a prolific playwright and hadn’t read his multi-volume magnum opus Septology (it sounded hard).

A Shining is short, a short story in book form (I think at under 50 pages it’s too short to properly count as a novella, but I’m slipping it in just before the end of Cathy’s Novellas in November event nevertheless). A man, a bit listless (maybe depressed – he mentions not eating properly in days), sets off in his car, with no clear route in mind. He drives randomly right, then left, before getting stuck at the end of a forest road. He can’t figure out how to get his car out, he can’t turn it round, and he can’t reverse out; he sits for a while with the heater on, then for some reason gets out and ventures off into the forest, even as it begins to get dark and to snow heavily. It begins to feel like a fable. The man becomes disorientated and cold, but slowly becomes aware of a mysterious presence: “luminous in its whiteness, shining from within”, as well as encountering his parents along the way, who act in a matter-of-fact way, albeit with somewhat dreamlike logic.

I was unclear whether this was a spiritual redemption tale, of a man lost both figuratively and literally who finds enlightenment in his journey through the forest, or conversely an unsettling story of a man with depression somewhat passively attempting suicide and gradually succumbing to the symptoms of hypothermia. Redemption or tragedy – you decide! I’m certainly interested now to read more of Fosse’s work – people rave about his Septology sequence in a cultish way.

It reminded me of other books, but not in a derivative way: Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot for the sense of artistry in repetition and inertia, fellow Norwegian Hanne Ørstavik’s Love for the sense of crisis in the cold and Kobo Abe’s The Woman in the Dunes for its misguided lonely protagonist.


Bruno Bettelheim: The forest “signifies a psychoanalytic space – a place separated from
everyday experience in which to be lost is to be found”


Overall progress in bucket list aim to Read and Watch the World (by reading/reviewing for each country 5 books, 5 films/TV, an artist or artists, TV, food, music)
NORWAY
Books:

Films:

Artist:

Book review: The Birthday Party by Laurent Mauvignier (France)

Translated by Daniel Levin Becker

Published by the stylish Fitzcarraldo, and longlisted for the 2023 International Booker prize, The Birthday Party (published in French in 2020 as Histoires de la Nuit) takes its time in going places.

Set over the course of a single day in the small French hamlet of Three Lone Girls, preparations are under way for Marion’s low-key 40th birthday celebrations. She lives on a quiet farm with her husband Patrice and their daughter Ida. Their marriage has some issues, and both Marion and Patrice are keeping secrets from each other. Next door lives Christine, an ageing artist who lives alone, gets on well with Patrice and is very fond of Ida, often providing informal childcare after school. Then a stranger arrives at Christine’s door.

The Birthday Party is a long book, at around 500 pages, with labyrinthine sentences, and it took me a while to get into it. French writers tend not to use 10 words if they can say it with 50. I had to slow my reading right down, and consciously make a point of taking my time with this novel.

The tension gradually ratchets up, however, and the book became a real page-turner. A multiple-perspective home invasion novel that is a work of literary fiction, this is nothing like a Linwood Barclay novel. I’m so fond of Fitzcarraldo novels that I’ve recently signed up for a four-book fiction subscription so I don’t miss any (they also publish non-fiction, and I’ve read and enjoyed a lot of their essays).

Book review: Novel with Cocaine by M. Ageyev (Russia)

Translated by Michael Henry Heim

Novel with Cocaine was published in Paris in 1934 by a Russian journal-in-exile, under the pseudonym M. Ageyev, and translated into English in 1984. It is book 11 of my 20 books of summer (I won’t manage to review them all). There was some speculation that it was secretly authored by Nabokov, though that appears to have been de-bunked. Nabokov himself described the book as ‘decadent and disgusting’.

The translation that I read seems to be out of print, but I picked up a secondhand copy on Amazon, where it is billed as “the story of an adolescent’s cocaine addiction”, although actually cocaine doesn’t feature until at least three-quarters the way through the book. There is a later translation by Hugh Aplin that maintains the double meaning in the original Russian title: ‘Romance with Cocaine‘.

The book follows its bad-boy protagonist, Vadim Maslennikov, through his final year of education and beyond, opening when he is approaching 17, and a prospective future lawyer.

He tries to act the dandy, though his mother is close to poverty, and cannot afford to subsidise his louche lifestyle after paying for his food and education. He behaves appallingly to his mother, and towards girls and women in general, living at the mercy of his sexual desires: ‘no matter where I was – on a tram, in a cafe, at the theatre, in a restaurant, in the street, anywhere and everywhere – I had only to glance at a woman’s figure, not her face but the seductive fullness of delicacy of her thighs, to picture myself dragging her to a bed, a bench, even a gateway, without so much as a word of introduction‘. He is sneering towards paid sex workers, and roams the streets for girls to impress with, for example, sleigh rides he can ill-afford, before seducing and then abandoning them.

After leaving school, Vadim falls briefly in love with an older woman, but the relationship is doomed and he soon experiments with cocaine, immediately finding solace in drug use and becoming obsessed with getting hold of his next hit. His all-consuming love and obsession is for the drug, and he follows his warped philosophizing as his life is taken over by drug use: ‘During the long nights and days I spent under the influence of cocaine in Yag’s room I came to see that what counts in life is not the events that surround one but the reflection of those events in one’s consciousness…’.

Billed as metaphor for the ‘violent purification’ of the Bolshevik revolution of 1917, I’m afraid my Russian history is very rusty and any such analogy went entirely over my head. But it works as a damning account of disenfranchised youth.